Most of the reviews for A Beautiful Planet admired the extraordinary panoramas that can be seen from the ISS, like this image of southern lights. (The Space Station's solar panels are visible at the upper right.)

we did science and spacewalks and all kinds of things, but I think this movie is the most important thing I did because it brings space to people ... Most people can't go to space, unfortunately, so it's a way to share our experience with people on Earth.[11]

Some of the movie's images illustrate geographical realities that are not necessarily obvious from the ground but which are apparent when viewed from space. For example, the circular structure of Lake Manicouagan in Quebec, Canada may not be evident to a person in a kayak paddling along its jagged, indented shoreline. However, an astronaut looking down on this annular lake from the Space Station can clearly see that it is an enormous ring of water;[12] scientists believe that it is the flooded inner ring of an impact crater that formed when a meteor struck the Earth during the Late Triassic. Similarly, a person looking up into the deep blue sky from the ground may have the impression that it is a very thick envelope of air surrounding the Earth, but an ISS astronaut looking at the atmosphere edge-on sees the reality that, compared to the Earth's diameter, it is roughly as thick as the skin on an apple.[13]

The movie also contrasts Earth's driest and wettest areas by showing an overhead sequence of the Namib Desert's red sands on the east cleft by the blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean's Skeleton Coast on the west, and repeats the widely accepted idea[15] that the Namib is the "oldest desert" on Earth. (Though there are questions as to exactly when and how the Sahara turned from a green savanna into a desert,[16] there is consensus that the Namib has been arid for tens of millions of years longer than its enormous, "new" African neighbor to the north, and that it has had a desert climate longer than any other region in the world.[17])

Even though A Beautiful Planet contains a few dire warnings regarding climate change and environmental degradation, filmmaker Toni Myers wanted primarily to give moviegoers positive reasons why they might take better care of the Earth rather than scaring them. She told the Los Angeles Times, "I wanted to inspire people especially as to how beautiful the planet is, how fragile it is, how complex and diverse and varied it is ... Most of all I wanted to show why we want to find solutions to look after our planet. It's our only one."[33]

According to NASA,[39] the Space Station has about the same amount of internal pressurizedvolume as a Boeing 747 aircraft; it orbits fast enough to experience, on average, 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours; it has 2 bathrooms, a gym and a 360-degree bay window; approximately seven tons of food and other supplies are required to support a crew of three for about six months; more than 100 US-telephone-booth-sized rack facilities can be housed in the Station for operating the spacecraft systems and research experiments; and it provides more livable room than a conventional six-bedroom house.

Scott Kelly has an identical twin, Mark Kelly, who is also a retired NASA astronaut. The brothers have agreed to be the subjects of an unprecedented twin study; Mark stayed on Earth during Scott's eleven months aboard the ISS so that researchers could examine how an extended spaceflight affected Scott's body compared to Mark's.[45] While Scott was in space and then continuing after he returned, both twins gave periodic blood samples and DNA swabs, and they underwent body scans and many other medical tests.[46] In the epilogue to his 2017 book about the year long mission, Scott wrote that the very preliminary assessments of the data from the mission and from the twin study were promising:

The data is still being analyzed as I write this, and the scientists are excited about what they are seeing so far. The genetic differences between my brother and me from this year could unlock new knowledge, not only about what spaceflight does to our bodies, but also about how we age here on Earth. The Fluid Shifts study[47] Misha [Mikhail] and I did is promising in terms of improving astronauts' health on long missions. The studies I did on my eyes - which don't seem to have degraded further during this mission - could help solve the mystery of what causes damage to astronauts' vision, as well as helping us understand more about the anatomy and disease processes of the eye in general.

When Samantha Cristoforetti arrives at the Space Station she excitedly greets the other crew members already aboard, and then she moves to a portal window to take a look at the Earth from roughly 400 kilometers above the surface, orbiting at 28,000 kilometers an hour.

Describing her first view from the Station, Cristoforetti says, "I just couldn't resist taking a peek. I could see the Earth majestically flowing by,[50] almost like a river. I don't know what happiness is, but I was definitely happy at that time."

A Beautiful Planet makes very good use of the Cupola, a domed, 360 degree observation bay on the nadir (Earth-facing) side of the Station's Tranquility module / Node 3. It has six outwardly-angled windows arranged around a central, circular window which faces directly toward Earth. The circular window measures 80 centimeters in diameter; it is the largest window ever sent into space.[51] Many of the movie's scenes were filmed from the Cupola, and the astronauts themselves are shown taking photographs and gazing through its windows, enjoying its unparalleled views of Earth.

Even though the Cupola was constructed by the European Space Agency for the utilitarian purpose of giving astronauts a workstation where they could observe the Earth, the exterior of the Station, visiting vehicles, and the operation of the ISS robotic arms,[52] it also serves as a rejuvenation area where astronauts can relax and seek inspiration.[53] Some of the most recognizable images from the five space agencies that operate the Station show their explorers within the Cupola, contemplating our home planet.

Butch Wilmore and Terry Virts teamed up to perform three spacewalks over a nine day period from February 21 to March 1, 2015, and A Beautiful Planet shows footage from some of their EVA activities outside the Space Station. While they worked, both explorers were acutely aware that spacewalks are inherently dangerous. This is especially true if something unexpected happens,[61] but many of the significant hazards an astronaut is likely to encounter are predictable and difficult to avoid completely. In the movie Virts explains that possible punctures to their EMU spacesuits were a particular concern because "you 'walk around' by grabbing onto things with your gloves ... The outside of the Space Station [is] a jungle of wires and equipment and metal bars and trusses. If you accidentally sliced your glove or your spacesuit on one of the sharp edges, that could create a leak, and if that leak were big enough, you would die." Describing some of the other EVA hazards, Wilmore elaborates that the temperature is "almost 300 degrees [Fahrenheit] on the Sun side of the Space Station, [but when] you get in the shade, it's minus 275 degrees. You feel that inside the suit. My fingertips in the sunlight would feel like they were on fire almost ... [Also,] you have a safety tether attached to the Station, and it's on a reel ... You can be upside down, twisted, inverted; you can completely lose your spatial awareness about where you are and what your attitude is, and you can easily get tangled up in that safety tether if you're not cautious. Every single movement you make, you're making an effort to think [things] through."

After spending almost the entire film scrutinizing the Earth and the ISS (with its astronauts) in low Earth orbit, one of the final scenes of A Beautiful Planet briefly examines an important extrasolar planet (a planet outside of our solar system) which was discovered in 2014. The planet, Kepler-186f, was the first approximately-Earth-sized planet found to be orbiting within its star's habitable zone, or orbital area where liquid water could conceivably exist without freezing or vaporizing. In other words, it was the first discovery of an Earth-sized planet on which life could reside.[62]

An artist's conception of the Kepler-186planetary system, with the Earth-sized planet Kepler-186f shown on the right, the system's red dwarf star at the lower left, and the four other known planets in the system faintly visible in orbits closer to the host star.

The "Kepler" in this exoplanet's name comes from the fact that it was discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope, or "NASA Discovery Mission Number 10," a spacecraft observatory which is designed to find exoplanets in our region of the Milky Way Galaxy that are Earth-size and smaller, and that are within the habitable zone.[63] The planet orbits Kepler-186, a red dwarf star[64] about half the size and mass of the Sun[65] which lies in the direction of the constellationCygnus, about 500 light-years away.[66] The number "186" in the planet's name refers to the order in which its planetary system was discovered while scientists processed all of the data produced by the Kepler Space Telescope, and the planet itself is designated "f" because the first planet to be discovered in the system is designated as planet "b," the second discovered is "c," etc., and it was the fifth planet to be discovered.[67]

Even though the idea of interstellar travel to another planetary system like Kepler-186 is not feasible given current astronautics technology, some spaceflightfuturists find value in speculating about the currently-impossible,[68] and Samantha Cristoforetti is one of the dreamers. In the film she expresses the hope that someday future human explorers might somehow have the opportunity to investigate the Kepler-186 system in person.

A Beautiful Planet was written, produced and directed by Toni Myers, who created seven other space-themed IMAX films[69] such as Hubble 3D and Space Station 3D. The film premiered in Manhattan on April 16, 2016 and made its theatrical debut on April 29, 2016.[70][1] Despite being announced as distributor, Walt Disney Studios later removed association with the film prior to its release.[2]

Jennifer Lawrence at the movie's 2016 premiere in New York City: "It was an honor for me to lend my voice to such a beautiful film."

A Beautiful Planet is narrated by Jennifer Lawrence, the lead actress in The Hunger Games series of films. Discussing her part in the movie's production, she said, "It was an honor for me to lend my voice to such a beautiful film that will educate audiences."[71]

By narrating a science-themed IMAX documentary, Lawrence joined a group of well-known actors who recorded voice-overs for similar IMAX films, and who were probably not motivated by the money the project would pay. In 2002 Tom Cruise narrated the IMAX movie Space Station 3D, and Leonardo DiCaprio narrated the IMAX film Hubble 3D in 2010. Like Cruise and DiCaprio, Lawrence agreed to narrate A Beautiful Planet while her career was at a high point (she was the world's highest paid actress in 2015[72] and again in 2016[73]). When IMAX's CEO Richard Gelfond was asked to compare how much money IMAX had paid Cruise, DiCaprio and Lawrence to narrate their respective documentaries, Gelfond replied that none of them did it for the money.[70]

The astronauts who filmed the movie used digital IMAX cameras, and much of the footage they produced was shot through the seven window panes on the Space Station's domed Cupola module.[74] The use of digital cameras permitted cinematographer James Neihouse to review image sequences almost immediately and make suggestions for retakes, rather than waiting for bulky, one-take-only physical IMAX film to be developed once it had returned from space.[75]

Myers and Neihouse coordinated with their astronaut camera crew to take full advantage of the digital cameras' augmented capacity for filming in dim light. According to Myers, "We would not have the nighttime scenes without the digital dynamic range ... What the digital capture did was totally open up that night world to us, with stars, cities at night, lightning and other phenomena that you see at night, like aurora."[76]

Despite the fact that the digital cameras were state of the art, they may have simply turned out to be very, very expensive disposable cameras. The total cost of sending a single kilogram of supplies to the Space Station may exceed $20,000,[77] and retrieving items from the Station and returning them to Earth is similarly expensive. Once the movie's production team had downloaded the image sequences, it is quite possible the cameras themselves were incinerated in one of the ISS "trash dumps" aboard a Cygnus resupply ship.[78] (The Cygnus is a one-way cargo vehicle that is designed to burn up as it re-enters the atmosphere.[79])

A Beautiful Planet has been very well received by customary film reviewers, by popular science publications, and by audiences.

All 13 movie reviews listed on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film positive reviews. This resulted in an uncommon-but-coveted 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating by critics, while 80% of audiences also liked it.[80]

Much of the praise for the film centered around its stunning visuals. A review in the British newspaper The Guardian called it a "large-format eye-opener [which] achieves a breathtaking new perspective on Earthly life,"[81] while another enthusiastic review in The New York Times asked, "how can your eyes not bug out when given 3-D views of Earth, taken from space, on a stories-high Imax screen?"[2]

^Jones, Chris (December 19, 2017). "Why the International Space Station Is the Single Best Thing We Did". Wired magazine. Less than a century after the Model T was state of the art, we manufactured a kind of galleon in space and have sent men and women from 10 countries to live in it ... for nearly 20 years. By the time the ISS makes its fiery return to Earth, possibly in the late 2020s, it will have become a stepping stone to lunar colonies and the first human mission to Mars. It will have taught us so much about our ability to adapt to the most hostile of environments. The most beautiful too.

^Dick, Steven (May 2, 2005). "Why We Explore: International Cooperation". NASA website. '[O]ne can argue that the very act of negotiation, not to mention the implementation of the subsequent agreements, enhances international prospects for peace as projects of great moment for humanity are carried out despite the difficulties.' [From an essay by] NASA's Chief Historian, Steven J. Dick.

^"The atmosphere as a membrane". earth.rice.edu. Rice University. The atmosphere is very small compared to the rest of the planet. The Earth itself is nearly 13,000 km in diameter, but the atmosphere rises only a few tens of kilometers above the surface. If you were to compare the Earth to an ordinary apple, the atmosphere would be only as thick as the apple's skin.

^Zimmermann, Kim Ann (December 8, 2017). "Aconcagua: Highest Mountain in South America". Live Science. At 22,837 feet (6,961 meters), not only is it the highest mountain in South America, it is the tallest peak in all of the Americas, as well as the Southern and Western Hemispheres.

^Westberg, Marcus; Westberg, Kate (March 12, 2013). "The Oldest Desert in the World". National Geographic Intelligent Travel - Beyond the Guidebook. With its red dunes rolling endlessly into the ocean, the Namib is the oldest desert in the world - a sea of silica stretching along Namibia's entire Atlantic coast.

^"Permian mass extinction". BBC Nature website. October 2014. Archived from the original on 2015-06-22. Retrieved 2019-05-03. The Permian mass extinction has been nicknamed The Great Dying, since a staggering 96% of species died out. All life on Earth today is descended from the 4% of species that survived.

^Sutter, Paul (December 14, 2015). "Shields Up! How the Earth Got a Force Field". Space.com. [Earth's] invisible superpower - It's the magnetic field. Wrapped in its warm embrace, the Earth can withstand the incessant onslaught of the solar wind and the cosmic rays (streams of high-energy particles flooding through the universe).

^Achenbach, Joel (March 30, 2017). "How Mars lost its atmosphere, and why Earth didn't". The Washington Post. In 2013, NASA launched a robotic probe called MAVEN - for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution ... Thursday, in a paper in the journal Science, the MAVEN team published its first major finding: Much and possibly most of the Martian atmosphere has been lost to space, violently scraped from the planet by the solar wind.

^"Spot the Station". NASA website. Watch the International Space Station pass overhead from several thousand worldwide locations. It is the third brightest object in the sky and easy to spot if you know when to look up.

^Bolden, Charles; Holdren, John (January 8, 2014). "Obama Administration Extends International Space Station until at Least 2024". NASA website. The extension of ISS operation will allow NASA and the international space community to accomplish a number of important goals ... First, it will allow NASA to complete necessary research activities aboard the ISS in support of planned long-duration human missions beyond low-Earth orbit ... Second, ISS extension will extend the broader flow of societal benefits from research on the Station ... The ISS is also playing an increasingly important role in the study of the Earth and its changing climate.

^Virts, Terry (2017). View From Above: An Astronaut Photographs The World. National Geographic. p. 113. ISBN9781426218644. Science is the primary mission of the International Space Station.

^Pearlman, Robert (August 10, 2015). "Astronauts Snack on Space-Grown Lettuce for First Time". Space.com. As [NASA] strives toward missions farther into the solar system, Veggie will be a resource for the crew's food consumption. It could also be used by the astronauts for recreational gardening during the long-duration missions to an asteroid, the moon or Mars.

^Moskowitz, Clara (February 6, 2010). "World's Largest Space Window Headed to Orbit". Space.com. 'Crews tell us that Earth gazing is important to them,' said Julie Robinson, space station program scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. 'The astronauts work hard up there and are away from their families for a long time. Observing the Earth and the stars helps relax and inspire them.'

^Fuller, John (June 2, 2008). "Why do astronauts have to work out on the International Space Station?". HowStuffWorks. Aside from keeping fit and staying on top of their game, the main reason astronauts work out during trip into outer space is because they suffer from a condition similar to osteoporosis, a disease that results in a significant amount of bone loss.

^Kelly, Scott (2017). Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery. With Margaret Lazarus Dean. Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House. p. 174. ISBN9781524731595. One of the nice things about living in space is that exercise is part of your job ... If I don't exercise six days a week for at least a couple of hours a day, my bones will lose significant mass - 1 percent each month ... Our bodies are smart about getting rid of what's not needed, and my body has started to notice that my bones are not needed in zero gravity. Not having to support our weight, we lose muscle as well.

^Kelly, Scott (2017). Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery. With Margaret Lazarus Dean. Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House. p. 322. ISBN9781524731595. Kjell and I don't have to talk [after the November 6, 2015 ISS spacewalk] - we just share a look, the same look you'd give someone if you'd been riding down a familiar street together, chatting about this and that, and missed by nanoseconds being T-boned by an oncoming train. It's the look of realizing we've shared this experience that we both know was at the limit of our abilities and could have killed us.

^"Kepler and K2 - Mission overview". NASA website. January 4, 2018. The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets.

^"Naming of exoplanets". International Astronomical Union. Retrieved March 18, 2018. The number in each name refers to the order of the exo-solar system's detection or identification in the instrument's data ... The letter indicates the order of the planet's discovery around its host star. The first exoplanet discovered in another solar system is designated b; the second, c; the third d; and so on.

^Virts, Terry (2017). View From Above: An Astronaut Photographs The World. National Geographic. p. 138. ISBN9781426218644. Even getting simple things like food and clothes to astronauts on the space station ... takes a tremendous amount of money - the cost of bringing supplies to ISS is a minimum of $20,000 per kilogram, and by some accounting measures much higher than that.

^Moynihan, Tim (April 28, 2016). "A Beautiful Planet: Shooting IMAX Is Hard Enough On Earth. In Space, It's Preposterous". Wired magazine. One lens used for the [movie] was incinerated aboard a Cygnus trash-dump. It's a $30,000 piece of glass, one that [Marsha] Ivins calls 'the most beautiful lens, be still my heart.' Regardless of the cost of the equipment—or any emotional attachments—it's an unavoidable part of space travel. The rest of the gear used for A Beautiful Planet will likely also be jettisoned into the abyss.

^Siceloff, Steven (March 18, 2016). "Cygnus Set to Deliver Its Largest Load of Station Science, Cargo". NASA website. As the Cygnus approaches the end of its time connected to the station, astronauts will pack it with trash, spent experiments and other equipment no longer needed. It will all burn up as the spacecraft blazes through the atmosphere to end the flight with a safe impact in the Pacific Ocean.